


The Heart of the Matter

by DaughterOfDungeonBat



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Banned Together Bingo, BannedTogether2020, Canon is a Sandbox and I'm Anakin Skywalker, Codywan Week, Established Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Prompt Fill, Waiting Rooms, alien weatherman, codywan - Freeform, consequences of cloning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-28
Updated: 2020-07-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:48:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25565374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DaughterOfDungeonBat/pseuds/DaughterOfDungeonBat
Summary: Anakin gets an alarming message as he exits hyperspace over Coruscant, which leads to him spending far too long in a hospital waiting room with Obi-Wan Kenobi.Or, the clones were never meant to live past their usefulness and become people who are loved.
Relationships: CC-2224 | Cody/Obi-Wan Kenobi, Obi-Wan Kenobi & Anakin Skywalker
Comments: 22
Kudos: 226
Collections: Banned Together Bingo 2020, Codywan Week





	The Heart of the Matter

**Author's Note:**

> so I didn't quiiiiiite make it in time for day 1 (hurt/comfort), but I was playing dungeons and dragons and talking about Qui-Gon okay.  
> So this was... by far, the weirdest prompt I got on my bingo card. It was, literally, 'alien weatherman.' Not the hardest prompt for me personally to write (that'll be happy infidelity, which is coming later, and so far the brainstorming stage is pointing to more Codywan), but certainly strange!
> 
> (thanks TheSlimeAndTheMud for the 2AM title)

Anakin had never felt anger through the Force before. He knew he exuded it, that there were days it rolled off of him like heat haze from a bantha’s breath, but never before the infinitly long elevator ride through the Coruscanti hospital had he felt the Force shake with pure, unfiltered rage.  
  
In the last few seconds before the doors opened, Anakin stole a moment of meditation to lessen the weight on his chest. It was the first few seconds he had had to think since Padmè had contacted him with the name of the hospital, moments after he had gotten back to Coruscant with his new padawan.  
  
“Apparently Cody collapsed last night.” She had said, relaying what little information an apparently frantic Obi-Wan had given her, “I haven’t heard anything since then.”  
  
When the doors slid open, the first thing Anakin saw was an old holo unit, showing the flickering image of a dark blue toydarian reporting the weather on Toydaria.  
  
The next thing he saw was, of course, Obi-Wan.  
  
Obi-Wan was pacing, his hands clenched into shaking fists at his sides. He was muttering under his breath in furious, snarled Stewjoni.  
  
Anakin had never seen Obi-Wan pace before, not even in the heart of the war when Separatists lurked around every corner and hope was lost more and more each day.  
  
Yet here, in an off-white waiting room lined with mint green chairs and populated only by a teenage twi’lek wearing thick headphones and only occasionally glancing up from their datapad, he was circling like a caged rancor.  
  
Anakin reached out wordlessly through their old training bond, and was prepared when Obi-Wan whipped around to face him, hair tousled and eyes wide. He clearly hadn’t slept, and was still wearing what had probably been date night attire from the night before, though the top two buttons of his shirt had come undone at some point.  
  
“Anakin.” He said, his voice scratchy like someone who had just woken up.  
  
“Sit.” Anakin said, pointing at the chair that looked the most structurally sound. Obi-Wan obeyed without argument, and if Anakin had had any doubts that his former master had been pacing for several hours, the way he went boneless and his eyes glazed over with exhaustion the moment he hit the chair would have chased those thoughts away in an instant. “I’m going to be right back, okay?” Obi-Wan just nodded.  
  
It was Anakin’s hope that a cup of tea (disposable cup, bitter smelling liquid even to Anakin’s unrefined nose) would calm Obi-Wan enough to get some useful information out of him. Unfortunately, by the time Anakin was slowly turning the empty cup into modern art (the weather channel had finished up their report on Toydaria by that point, and a green Zabrak explained how the unusually cold winter in Corellia’s northern hemisphere would impact freighter production in the following year), Obi-Wan was nearly fuming.  
  
“It’s his heart. It’s his heart because he was never supposed to live this long. He was supposed to be thrown out like garbage and not a living person once he’d outlived his usefulness so his heart is breaking down in his chest.” Obi-Wan nearly ground his teeth while Anakin could just stare, the full weight of what he was saying slowly sinking in. “Now he could die because of what those Kaminoans did to him before he was even born.”  
  
Anakin desperately wanted to ask what this situation meant for the rest of the clones, whether the Jedi order would need to get word out to the millions of GAR veterans around the galaxy that their new lives were about to be interrupted by their vital organs failing without warning, but he knew that Obi-Wan was far too wrapped up in his own fear for Cody to even begin thinking about anything outside of this hospital.  
  
The irony was not lost on Anakin- that he was the one able to put his personal attachments aside to concern himself with the wider implications of the situation at hand.  
  
So put them aside he did, even as Obi-Wan moved like a hyperspace jump from anger to numb fear, his bloodshot eyes wide and unfocused.  
  
“We were talking, and then he-“ Obi-Wan gestured vaguely, absently, at his face. Eyes rolled back, and then he dropped, Anakin gathered with a suppressed shudder. Even imagining someone he loved falling into a heap in front of him had a cold hand clutching Anakin’s stomach. Before he could begin to reassure his old master that Cody had seen worse, that he would be fine, the doors leading into the treatment floor slid open and a tall, blue-green twi’lek doctor stepped out.  
  
Obi-Wan shot out of his chair and swayed on his feet. The doctor smiled at Obi-Wan, then made eye-contact with the teenager and gestured towards the elevator with one lek, and the younger twi’lek stowed their datapad and made for the exit. She turned her attention back to the two jedi when the elevator doors slid closed.  
  
“Master Kenobi?” Obi-Wan nodded tightly, still bracing for the worst as the doctor gestured for him to follow her. Anakin was close behind, partially by choice but mostly because of Obi-Wan’s death grip on his wrist.  
  
They wove through a few endless identical hallways until they stopped in front of one of the endless identical doors. The doctor gently touched Obi-Wan’s forearms, both centering his attention and pulling his hand away from Anakin’s wrist.  
  
“Cody is very tired, as I am sure you can imagine. He has a bacta patch-“ the doctor brought a hand to her sternum. “from the incision. You might see a bit of orange light- that just means the device helping his heart is working. He needs to stay calm, but I think he will be very happy to see you.”  
  
Obi-Wan nodded with all the solemnity that he had held when receiving marching orders during the war, and entered the room.  
  
Anakin was nearly knocked off of his feet by the wave of warmth through the Force- like soap bubbles and windchimes and freshly washed blankets. Obi-Wan replaced his mental shields a few moments later, and Anakin slid until he was sitting against the wall. Through the door, he could hear the lilt of Obi-Wan’s concerned voice and Cody’s low replies.  
  
Anakin had enough sense to know that he wouldn’t be needed for a while, and so sank to the floor. It wasn’t very comfortable, but it was preferable to trying to find his way back to the waiting room.  
  
Sitting on the shiny floor of the hallway made Anakin deeply regret forgetting to charge his own datapad on the flight back from the mission on Kalist. With the quickly dwindling power supply, he sent a quick message to Padmè updating her on Cody’s condition, and another to his Padawan apologizing for running off but swearing that they would practice with form II when he got back to the temple.  
  
_Angel <3- Glad to hear it. I’ll let Rex and Ahsoka know- they’ve been keeping the brothers updated while I’ve been at work. I haven’t been able to get in contact with L&L yet-  
  
_ Anakin groaned aloud and knocked his head into the wall as the screen went completely dead. And now he didn’t even have the weather channel to keep him company. He was doomed to never know the forecast on Ryloth.  
  
He wasn’t expecting Obi-Wan to open the door again, but when he did, his smile was infectious.  
  
“I’ve been instructed to collect you.” He said, stifling a yawn. “Apparently, someone thinks that I won’t sleep until there’s someone else to keep watch.”  
  
“Yes, General.” Anakin said, taking Obi-Wan’s offered arm to pull himself to his feet and through the door.  
  
“Hey.” Cody croaked. And he had certainly seen better days. He was pale enough to make the scar around his eye stand out like a fresh wound and the inside of his elbow was purple from the IV, but he was certainly alive. “Damn clankers can’t take me out and then I drop dead over dinner.”  
  
“No one dropped dead.” Obi-Wan said. He kissed the corner of Cody’s mouth before falling, boneless, into a chair next to the bed.  
  
“Look like you’re about to.”  
  
Obi-Wan just grumbled in reply- a clearer indication than anything that he was fading fast.  
  
“Skywalker,” Cody said in a whisper when Obi-Wan was definitely, solidly, asleep a few minutes later. “Can you hand me my pants?” He gestured to the small pile of what Anakin assumed was what Cody had been wearing when he came in.  
  
“Bad news, looks like they cut them off.” Anakin said, digging through the pile. Cody muttered what Anakin had recently learned was a Stewjoni swear roughly translating to ‘the flaccid penis of one’s father.’  
  
“So docs can make five million of us with the same face, but they’ve still got to shred my clothes to get my heart beating?”  
  
The attempt at humor died when Cody saw Anakin realize what the weight in the pocket of said cut pants was. The look Anakin gave him was, plainly, pity. Cody huffed a long sigh and tried valiantly to deflate into the uncomfortable lumps of the hospital bed.  
  
“So last night was the night?”  
  
It wasn’t a question that needed answering, but Cody nodded at the flickering fluorescent light over his head anyway. There was the always too-loud sound of a chair being pulled across cheap flooring as Anakin moved closer, sitting backwards in what could not have been a comfortable position, with his arms thrown over the back of the chair and a good-humored grimace on his face.  
  
“You know,” he said, flexing his durasteel hand, “I had just come out of surgery to get the charred part of my arm cut off when Padmè asked me. So you wouldn’t be, you know, without precedent.”  
  
“Can’t ask him now.” Cody said, his voice painfully flat. He’d already considered that option. “Then he’d feel too bad to say no.”  
  
Anakin just shook his head.  
  
As if there was any chance of Obi-Wan saying anything but yes, but Anakin felt no need to point it out in a room that smelled like antiseptic.

**Author's Note:**

> For anyone wondering on the whereabouts of 'L&L,' Luke is in the trunk of a three million year old tree on a planet with no name meditating on the place of a single dewdrop in the universe. Leia has just been dropped off on a forest planet with a knife and coordinates to a pickup point.  
> Yoda and Mace have very different views on training padawans.  
> Also! I mention Anakin having a new padawan- he's a tusken named Vekree Thannur and he has an orange saber! He joined the order a little older as part of an attempt to reach out to groups who haven't been represented in the Jedi. He's also completely my baby, and I'm sure you'll be seeing more of him.


End file.
